Words

My friend Kim says she is annoyed when she reads something written by someone with 12 years of public education who can’t use simple words properly, such as the words to, too, and two. I understand how she feels. I, too, have word annoyances.

I get annoyed when I hear someone pronounce cache as if it were spelled “cashay”. Cache is pronounced “cash”. It means a hiding place used especially for storing provisions or concealing valuables, or it can refer to the actual items stored in the hiding place. Military people often refer to finding a “cache of weapons” (and they are the worst offenders – they always pronounce it “cashay”). Computers have cache memory, which is a small amount of high speed memory used for storing frequently accessed data.

I’m not being picky here because, as it happens, there is a word pronounced “cashay”, and that word is the French word cachet. Cachet refers to a seal on a document and so has come to mean a mark of quality or distinction or authenticity, as in, “Suffolk County has a nice sports arena but it doesn’t have the cachet of the Garden.”

Another peeve of mine is when I hear the word homage pronounced “oh-mahjz”. Homage is a perfectly good English word and it’s pronounced “hom-ij”. Don’t try to impress me with faux French.

What is up with people wanting to pronounce English words as if they were French? Like turbot, the fish. It’s an English word and it’s pronounced “tur-bot”, not “turbo”. I even hear people pronouncing the store name Target as “tar-jzay”. For Pete’s sake people, the store’s logo is a target. Give it a rest. You’ll never impress anyone by mispronouncing words as if they were from another language that you wish you could speak – and then, when you do get the opportunity to use actual French words, you use the wrong word because you don’t know how to pronounce the word you meant to use.

The problem is that people want to sound better educated than they are. Hint: if you want to sound educated, get educated! Pick up a book on words and learn something.